January 7, 2017

I started reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Gene: An Intimate History, partly because I’m taking a human genetics class this quarter and partly because I loved his other book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The latter was dense and chewy and took me some time to read and The Gene promises to do the same. The book opens with Mukherjee describing the toll of schizophrenia in his own family. Two of his four uncles and one cousin “suffered from various unravelings of the mind.” The cousin, Moni, who currently lives in an institution, is the son of an uncle who did not have schizophrenia.

Mukherjee eloquently describes how the spectre of insanity haunts his family, how he felt compelled to tell his future wife on one of their early dates about his family history. I totally get it, my own family has that particular sword of Damocles poised overhead. Why does mental illness develop in one sibling and not another? Why does it skip one generation, only to pop up in another?

Mukherjee says that “Like most Bengalis, my parents had elevated repression and denial to a high art form…” Yeah, Bengalis and Catholics have that in common. My brother and sister had various—let’s call them personality quirks, which went unaddressed and certainly undiagnosed. Neither finished high school, both were extremely bright and creative, both could make me laugh until I cried and my stomach hurt, both had trouble navigating day-to-day interactions with the world.

I say “were” because my sister passed away in 2013 from complications from Graves’ Disease, and my brother hasn’t spoken to anyone in my family in more than 19 years. In the time preceding my sister’s death, I would get frustrated trying to talk to her doctors, who couldn’t legally speak to me about her mental or physical condition. I wanted to organize her life from 1,000 miles away, but that sure as hell didn’t work. Thank goodness my dad and step-mom were nearby the morning my sister didn’t wake up and my teenage nieces called 911.

I was particularly close to my brother, Steve, whom I idolized. When I was 7 or 8, he was inspired by Willie Wonka and Chocolate Factory to transform our friend Mary’s backyard playhouse into a voluptuous candy paradise. When I was 14, I woke up one May 1^st to find my bedroom full of flowers and Vanessa Redgrave on the record player singing The Lusty Month of May. Steve and I used to bike around our LA neighborhood at midnight on hot summer nights. We would find heavenly pockets of night-blooming jasmine and privet and ride back and forth through them until our noses couldn’t detect the scent anymore. It was magic. My husband says Steve is the only man he was ever remotely jealous of.

But there was some stuff that was not so magic, too, like the year he barely left his room. Or the morning of our dad’s second wedding, when my husband and I went to pick up Steve and he wasn’t home. Steve had left a sticky note on his kitchen counter saying he wasn’t going. He was supposed to be the best man but felt such animosity towards our dad that he couldn’t do it and didn’t have the guts to communicate his refusal. He left me to lie through my teeth to my stricken father and say that Steve was sick. Or not long after the wedding-ditching incident, when I realized that he had stopped talking to me, and that every phone call and letter would not be returned.

At some point in everyone’s life, you see a school, job, or person you want and say “You!” And that school, job, or person will say, “Nope, not you.” It doesn’t matter who you are, how intelligent, accomplished, beautiful, or rich. Someone, somewhere, will say “Not you.” It’s a universal human experience. It took me a long time to get over Steve saying “not you” to me. I realize that it was nothing personal, that his own demons and issues with our parents made him feel like cutting all ties was the only way for him to move foreword. But it was one of those things that results in a heart fissure that never quite heals.

When I was little I used to pore over old issues of National Geographic and see picture of exotic locales like Angkor Wat, Easter Island, and Borneo and think, ah yes, I will visit those places! It was also from National Geographic that I learned that space was infinite and the sun would eventually burn out. Both of these facts deeply disturbed me. I wanted space to be finite, but if it were, then nothing would go on forever after space ended. Spooky. I’m still not OK with the sun thing.

I also used to think that when we died, we would have a brief moment of perfect understanding of the entire universe before permanently snuffing out. We would understand all kinds of things, both brilliant and mundane—stuff like complicated math proofs, what dinosaurs really looked like, and why your grandma had that weird facial tic. I understand intellectually that I won’t be able to see everything on planet. But I still have hopes about the death-all-knowledge moment, even if it’s just some neural spasm. The pain of Steve’s ghosting has receded over time, but the curiosity remains. Why did he do it?